The New Orleans plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
27° on Nov. 17, 1970, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1946. Next is 28° in 1968.
New Orleans’s center stands barely above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -10 ft to 20 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (clay), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
New Orleans has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 47° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 New Orleans normally reaches 70° and falls to 56°. The record high is 84°, in 1993; the record low 36°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at New Orleans Lakefront Airport, 6 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
